MSB: The meta-discussion

[faraday]

@Ghost said in MSB: The meta-discussion:

It's smarter for you to moderate the forum, not participate much, and enjoy your rp without fear of a difference of opinion stamping you as persona non grata and having it infiltrate the main reason you're in the community in the first place: To seek roleplay and creativity with relatively small amounts of harassment.

Is that what folks really want this forum to be though? A place where people shy away from posting their opinions for fear of being dogpiled?

I mean, yes, sometimes people speak out against the dogpiling. But not always. And even when they do, it doesn't always stop.

I expect that sort of thing from Random People On The Internet, which is why I steer clear of open forums like Reddit. I can't read comments on Facebook without instantly regretting it. But I guess I kind of hoped for more from a smaller community which seems to have some designs on being, well, a community.

[mietze]

I have yet to see doxxing here or RL pictures posted or encouragement for people to go outside MSB to harass someone (if there's even a whiff it gets slapped down). Saying here is as bad as WORA is hyperbole, to be honest.

In fact, I see people calling each other out on their personal hypocrisy far less than they could. And generally there's a devils advocate or challenger for every negative thing said.

I am pretty sure this is largely due to the aging of the mush population and everyone even those dreaded shut ins having lives and options other than mushing, so people just let a lot of shit go. Which is good, imo, even if not always appreciated.

[Ghost]

@faraday I don't think that's what people want. I know that's not what I'd prefer, but there is an unspoken MSB board tai chi about how you post an opinion, with which language, or how strongly you feel about it to avoid the dogpiling.

You? Hah. I don't know how you do it, @faraday. I try to type like I talk in real life. I try to be the genuine article and sometimes that means my inflection gets lost in the text-translation, You've always maintained this sort of constructive, even-handed approach on the boards, even when you've flat out disagreed with me on some topics, and I respect the level of respect you treat people with. You seem to be a very nice person and it shows. It's like you have Professor X's delivery and I feel like I have Wolverine's. Having said that, do you sometimes reword statements to remain diplomatic and avoid getting stuck at the bottom of the dogpile?

You may be more naturally eloquent than I am in your board posts, maybe you type on these boards precisely as you talk in real life, under stress or not, but I do know my more "less diplomatic, more blue collar" writing style on these forums has gotten me into unexpected dogpiling on more than ten occasions, and I put my success rate of being to talk my way out of it somewhere around 45%

[bored]

This thread has made me reflect on a few things:

Several people comment how they don't play, and just kind of participate here. To me this is a hint of how little there is to actually enjoy in the hobby any more. Most games have the same problems they always have, good RP is painfully scarce, and little of what you can scrape up is worth the effort. Of course, a lot of this is due to a change in personal standards of effort/reward compared to games getting worse, although there are factors on that side too (very sandboxy games, etc).

I obviously count in the above category, except that I don't even post here that much. And when I do, it's primarily to be negative. So I probably haven't moved on as much beyond the WORA mindset as I'd like to think, which is on me. Then again, I think there's a lot of people like me; it's just a matter of the degrees to which people go to veil their vitriol in politeness.

The hive mind has come out in force to defend the fact that the hive mind totally isn't a thing. Quelle shock.

MSB is probably more useful as an advertising forum than anything else. The discussions are painfully circular rehashes of the same discussions we've been having for decades, no one has changed their opinions much, and any of the scarcely few good ideas we've ever come up with are typically ignored by game makers in favor of same old, same old.

I'm old and bitter.

[Ghost]

@mietze said in MSB: The meta-discussion:

In fact, I see people calling each other out on their personal hypocrisy far less than they could

The ONLY reason we don't see more drag-out, fist throwing, hair-pulling personal attacks on this forum is because if done here, it would be tied to an identity, and that identity could potentially lose out on RP, be excluded from games, and even being involved in a nasty personal whistleblowing stint on MSB could cause reputational damage.

That's why you really only see it when someone has hit the gives zero fucks point.

This is why all of the private gossip, exclusion, reputational my damaging conversations, and making fun of people happens on Discord, Skype, Facebook, and pages with controlled groups of buddies people trust to not rat on them.

[mietze]

Nah, it's not the only one. I've seen some whoppers told, which takes brass ones since they're told in the presence of those who know differently.

I think probably 10-15 years ago a hair pulling eye scratching fight might have broken out; but as I said the vast majority of people mushing these days have lives, jobs, families, etc. Even the crazy and/or habitually princessing ones.

Also that's just stupid. Everyone knows that everything you say in skype and all always gets back to people eventually. Always has been the case for off-mush communications in my 20 years of mushing.

[Ghost]

@mietze said in MSB: The meta-discussion:

Everyone knows that everything you say in skype and all always gets back to people eventually.

I can agree with you on this. I can attest that this is one-hundred percent true.

Edit/Addition: ...But it doesn't stop it from happening as if it won't get back to the person.

[mietze]

Or getting pissed/indignant/betrayed when it does.

To be fair, this happens in every organizational adult group I've been part of too. Workplace, PTA, professional associations, political parties, animal rescues, blah blah blah.

[surreality]

I've recently hit the 'I don't think I can do this any more' in terms of RP point, which, as @bored mentions, is a bit of a thing sometimes around here.

It isn't a lack of options for me, that much I can say. I long ago lost count of all of the people who, with genuine good intent, always reached out to invite me to join them on a variety of games whenever I'd mention being in a slump, frustrated, etc. There are genuinely good people here, full stop, who give an actual damn about the other people here.

So it isn't lack of options, at least not for me. It's that I genuinely appreciate people who, most of them barely knowing me from a hole in the wall, are that open, considerate, and welcoming. It's that I have had a pretty epic string of bad luck going on for about 8 years now, with what looks like it's gonna be the final blow to whatever heart I had to try the 'delve into a story and whee!' again; I've been dropped on my head too many times in a row on that particular trust fall and am brain-damaged at this point, more or less. The latest incident of this [not the batshit crazy story] involved a very dear friend of a handful of years, someone I can honestly say I trusted more than I've trusted anyone before in my life, and... well, it has all gone so sideways that somebody may as well have reached into my chest and tore my heart out, shrugged a little, tossed it over their shoulder, and wiped the blood off their hands on their pants before insisting everything's cool, right? Right? Yeah... no. After that, my heart for that part of the hobby, and any last little flicker of hope I could find any happiness there, is hidden under the raccoon's butt, y'all.

(Sorry... but it's about dead on.)

But about... 2-3 years ago, now, starting on WORA, I asked a lot of questions about how people do stuff. How would they improve it? And I watched the same arguments play out over and over, with very little ever getting resolved, and the only real agreement being that there was no way known to solve any of them. I stopped asking the questions, and instead started looking for the roots of the problems, as I saw them, and try to come up with ideas outside the echo chamber of 'it can't be done'.

And for the most part, I shut up, retreated into my cave, and tinkered. I expected it would be a process that would take, say, a few months. It's been years now. I'm still tinkering. It's slow going, but it's going. Maybe it will work. Maybe it won't. Once in a while, I still ask questions. I'm still interested in that project because, as of right now, at least, it's a problem to solve, and maybe it's something that could be useful to folks, some of whom I mention above as doing things I think are good and good-hearted things, and plenty of others who I have had plenty of fun with over the years.

There are always new and more problems, and when they emerge, they seem to do it here. Then they can get added to the list of things that, frankly, may not make me happy the way RP once did, but at least help to take my mind off of the being sad bit when I have to beat my head against code (which I am incredibly bad at) and so on.

[ThatGuyThere]

@faraday said in MSB: The meta-discussion:

Is that what folks really want this forum to be though? A place where people shy away from posting their opinions for fear of being dogpiled?

I would rather have it be that than become a place where people are not free to express themselves for fear of hurting someone's feeling or because they might not phrase it in a manor that everyone likes.

[faraday]

@Ghost said in MSB: The meta-discussion:

Having said that, do you sometimes reword statements to remain diplomatic and avoid getting stuck at the bottom of the dogpile?

Thank you. And sure I have to reword things. Or find myself typing up a post and just deleting it before posting. Nobody's perfect. But I do at least try to stay constructive, just in a general "do unto others" sort of way.

I don't mind a healthy debate, truly. But 'debate' to me implies that both sides have to be at least willing to respect the other side and consider the pros and cons of each argument, even if they ultimately disagree. That's often in short supply on the internet (not just here) and it just devolves into two sides with closed minds telling each other how wrong they are.

[EmmahSue]

@Pandora

The Hog Pit is a bit ugly, a lot cruel, and often for the fierce joy of that cruelty. There's nothing particularly wrong with that (it's not my favorite gin joint, still I've had my posts and responses o'er time), but it's also not something that aids in the... evolution? Growth? of our community at large. It was set opt-in so that it would be a deliberate, conscious choice to take part. "Do I want to do this?" "Yes, click." As gates go, it's not locked, or even particularly proverbially high. It's just a moment of decision to step through, and meanwhile the folks who don't want to participate are relatively clear of the mud.

You're absolutely right that this makes it less visible; we don't think that's a bad thing in the end. To my mind, it's turning the prism to get a slightly different facet, to mix metaphors in the most egregious way possible. That doesn't mean the other facets are gone, only that they're not center stage. We could probably do the same with this category (non-game things), but it seems a bit over the top to make everything opt-in. So it's about as even-steven a compromise between 'gonna bathe in the fountaining blood' and 'only pristine unicorns please' as we can get, given the limitations of a forum that doesn't allow for mind-reading ahead of time. As I said above, it's framework with guidance built in.

ES

eta: This thread isn't in non-game, that sentence makes less sense. Flashything! Pretend I know what I'm talking about.

[Paris]

@bored said in MSB: The meta-discussion:

Most games have the same problems they always have, good RP is painfully scarce, and little of what you can scrape up is worth the effort. Of course, a lot of this is due to a change in personal standards of effort/reward compared to games getting worse, although there are factors on that side too (very sandboxy games, etc).

I disagree that good RP is painfully scarce, I find wonderful roleplayers pretty regularly (and I don't think my standards are low). But I've never gotten tired of public RP, even after over 20 years of MU*ing, and a lot of folks nowadays seem to consider random public RP an obstacle between themselves and the RP they want- like roleplayers have started to see other roleplayers as obstacles between themselves and roleplay. But the quality seems pretty consistent, imo.

I love meeting new folks. Sure, I've got my own RP peeves, sure, you run into some real weirdos, but the majority of roleplayers I meet are all right, and every now and then you find some superlatively good writers. Many of them, I find, are like me: we pose at about the level of what's around, and are happy to raise our game when we meet someone else willing to do the same.

[bored]

@Paris Cool? I mean you do you, I am explicitly not claiming the hobby is dead, but acknowledging that some portion of us seem to have disengaged from it, possibly for no more grandiose reason than simply growing out of it. There's nothing to refute or defend here.

Curiously, though I'm not sure what you precisely mean by 'public RP', it's not what bothers me at all? If you look at my prior post, I point out the issue of sandbox-y games, which is pretty much the polar opposite issue. It's why my WoD career ended in the TR era, it always just seemed like so many smaller cliques RPing in private, player run plots tailored to those groups, etc, and a lot less engagement with a general shared story that felt common in Ye Olden Times of WoD.

[mietze]

In real life too, how you say something or what you write has huge impact into whether or not people perceive it like you meant it.

I mean is that not communication 101? If you word your criticism full of passive-aggressiveness or condescension, is it surprising if it's not heard beyond that? If you want to tell someone they're uneducated about something but your letter is full of misspellings and grammatical errors, will it be taken as seriously? If you retell a story for the benefit of others, leaving out key details and/or very deliberately minimizing an ugly role you had, should you be surprised if people who're also involved come forward to correct the details (or present another side) even if that side story was just meant to be entertaining and not the main thrust of the conversation?

I am not sure I can fault MSB or any text medium for being a place where you must either be very clear or willing to clarify (both of which need thought and some degree of care) when you post. I am not sure I can think of any place as an adult that's a meeting of passionate peers (with no hierarchy or unifying expectation, like a workplace) where that's not the case, tbh.

[Paris]

@bored The way you had worded something made me think of some things that a few folks have groused about lately; interestingly the same starting point ('maybe things are different'), but directly the opposite complaint.

FWIW, about six months back, I was racking my brains as to why I couldn't break into RP, all of a sudden, and wondering if I'd changed, what was I doing to put people off (which is always good imo if there's a recurring issue), but it mostly came down to sphere (and somewhat the game). I went from sitting around most nights and never getting plot RP to juggling multiple scenes a night, and it was really gratifying.

It's a bummer that TR had to be your last game. It drove off several of my friends from the hobby.

[Derp]

@surreality re: Tinkering

I know that this probably isn't as constructive as it could be, but I'll throw my two cents in here.

I think that part of our problem, as a culture, is that we're convinced that there is some One True Right and Only Way to do things. We design our games around this idea. We build our community around this idea. But at the end of the day -- there are too many people here for any one thing to be right for all of them. We're not one community. We're several different communities that share a common thread, but one that's nebulous enough that it cannot be solidified into any one solid thing. It's online RPG, sure, but that's about where the commonalities end.

Some of us like WoD. Some of us like D20. Some of us like Lords and Ladies or homebrew or games based on different kinds of fantasy fandoms.

And that is not a singular community. That is a creole of different beliefs, cultures, etc, and we come here because we can use a sort of lingua franca to try and reach out to each other. And in doing so, we try and compare notes and such, but at this point, I think that we can safely agree on; there is no one way. The best way is the one that makes the game run like the game-runners want the game to run, and players will either enjoy that way, or they won't.

Places like this help to solidify ideas, but I don't think it's fair to use it as some sort of lab to try and create the very best thing for everyone. Everyone is different. There will always be differences of opinion, people who would be happier if things were different (and people who are happiest with things just the way they are). At best, this place gives us an outlet so that we can say 'this would be better if...' and see how many people agree with that sentiment, which can be the impetus for other games where things run differently.

From what I understand, we used to have a great deal many more places available. Now there aren't so many. We've got people like Theno out there making it easier for people to start things within specific genres, especially with his various WoD stats systems, but at the end of the day, it's still costly and time-consuming. And with that, there should be... I dunno. A certain amount of leeway given to game-runners that we don't often see in places like this, because they're not doing things A Certain Way.

Given that ... perhaps it's time we tried to figure out how to make it easier for the folks to make their own games when they dissent with the way certain ones are run (despite all the arguments against GOMO foo, it's still the best option for getting more options). I think that we could figure out a way, as a hobby, to make it cheaper, easier, and overall more efficient, rather than trying to find the One Gameplan to Rule Them All.

[bored]

@Paris Ah ok. I mean I can get the 'public RP' gripe if translated to the most narrow 'coffee shop' definition, but in general I'm much more interested in games where there's frequently people in character on the grid, where events happen that you can just walk into, etc. Good public engagement is kind of my measure of an interesting, healthy MU. If people are going to Sandbox and RP in private, I don't see why they couldn't just skip the CG process and do it on Shang.

I didn't really play much on TR, I'm just kind of highlighting that generation/era of WoD games as where I stopped, it could really even be a little earlier with some of the pioneer 2.0 games. The culture felt different and I failed to feel engaged by it. Most of my last run was on various Lords & Ladies style games (both literal and sci-fi). They have their own set of problems, namely usually devolving into a pretty princess fantasy for the creator, failing to give the 'plebes' enough role in the story (despite often being small games), etc.

[surreality]

@Derp I actually agree 100% re: 'one true wayism' -- it's utter bunk, really.

I'm working on a system that may or may not suck. There are policies that may or may not suck (but are easy to replace). It's all set up on a wiki, pretty much, with slow tinkering on code to allow people to bring that data into the game. Chargen will be a simple web form.

Once all the various code and base game system is in, I'm going to be doing a clone of the droplet with a basic wiki design, stripped of any of the 'custom' stuff for this world and these policies to play in it, and... well, basically anybody who wants a clone of the stripped droplet can then have one to build from, with a system (that may or may not suck, but is/will be easy to mod/add to/subtract from) with little more than filling out some wiki forms required, really. No books required, all of the data required to play is right there on wiki and in game, sheets are being set up to be hot-clickable so you can double-check your weird ability X directly from your character sheet itself on the wiki (so no need for people to make themselves cheat sheets to remember what does what), just fill in the world/setting data you want, scrap whatever policies you hate, build your grid, and... well, ready to go, pretty much. (Part of what's taking time is that that means documenting EVERYTHING as clearly as possible.)

It'd only work through digital ocean, but they DO allow people to store a complete backup of a droplet, and then send copies of it to others, who can then boot it up on their own from there, and do whatever the heck they want with it on their own account with the framework foo pre-built.

Some things people would have to suck up, mostly: all the IC info (other than the content of jobs, alt IDs, complaints, and the necessarily very very private RL/OOC business of a game) is public due to the nature of mediawiki. Sheets are public. Backgrounds are public. Etc. But if people can live with that? It'll be reasonably painless, and I think/hope it may be one of the easier ways for new game creators to get a head start, since it'll mostly be 'fill out the forms with your creative stuff and it'll auto-populate the wiki and the +game files (which is hybridized news/+help/etc. with categories)'.

That's the plan, anyway. It would be easy enough for someone passably tech-savvy to adapt to an existing system, I would think, since I had it half done for CoD before switching over to the OT stuff, and I'm sure someone would eventually clean up the actual code to not be the kind of thing people look at and wince (while rubbing their temples and downing shots) in some later iteration.

So I'm working on a framework that can maybe be an easier head start, but the actual game? Naw, that's gonna be niche as hell and I'm happy with that. Separate things, just being built more or less in tandem.

[Paris]

@bored I sent you a message, since we might be on a similar page about WoD games, and I didn't want to derail the discussion here.